Middle of the Road

While most people are not leaving home to attend their work places, and the rest of us are venturing beyond the front door only to exercise or buy food, a new adventure, of sorts, has quickly grown, mainly out of necessity: walking in the road space.  Unless an oncoming pedestrian looks ahead and waits at a corner or pauses in an open driveway, we may be forced to take the lead and venture into the nearside road lane.  The opportunities are even there on normally busy roads, and the author has even spent the best part of an hour walking in the road and met no more than five or six cars.

Waiting for the Olympic Torch Relay in 2012; an excited throng along a quiet Hatfield Road.

Co-incidentally, in creating material for a local digital newsletter a month ago I made mention of an advance notice by the BBC that it intends to build a programme of London 2012 Olympic events, including running the full opening ceremony from the Olympic Park.  There is, of course, plenty of room in the schedules since the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics.  In the newsletter I reflected on one part of 2012 which most closely involved the East End of St Albans, which was the Torch Relay.  So we remember that joyous day along Hatfield Road, when, after the road closure and before the torch bearers passed westwards towards the city centre, a number of us walked casually in the middle of Hatfield Road, paused, chatted, even sat down, the latter just because we could!  I mused that such a chance would probably never again be experienced by any of us without putting ourselves in danger.  I wrote it at the time of the event, and I repeated it for the recent newsletter, but as soon as the words were on the page, the reality of a repeat opportunity was suddenly created, even for short bursts of time in Hatfield Road.

A busy Hatfield Road c1910, Fleetville, but not a motor vehicle in sight.

Probably the earliest surviving photograph of Hatfield Road, Fleetville has come to rare notice, partly because of the inferior quality of the image.  In spite of this it tells of a busy period of day outside the printing works, now replaced by Morrison's.  It can be dated to around 1910, as the County Council had carried out paving the length of Hatfield Road in that year.  But the numbers of residents or employees casually walking in the roadway, with no more danger than from passing cyclists, suggests the arrival of a motor vehicle was still a rare event.

The same view over 100 years later, with the print works building replaced by a supermarket.
COURTESY GOOGLE STREETVIEW

Being less confident than the 1910 photographer the author left it to a Google Streetview vehicle driver to capture a recent photograph taken roughly at the roundabout giving access to Royal Road in one direction and the Morrison's car park in the other.  This is where the 1910 photographer would have stood.  Royal Road would be just out of sight to the left of the picture and a gateway leading to spare land owned by Smith's printing works just to the right of the tree at the right edge.  This gateway would later be the entrance to Marconi Instruments Fleetville.  Behind the two hatted ladies closest to the photographer were trees and shrubs on spare land behind the lay-by in the modern picture, and a shop blind reveals the location of Bycullah Terrace.  The only other difference were the tall trunk telephone wire poles which marched their way along Hatfield Road on their way to Hatfield; today the wires are protected in trunking and lie beneath our feet.

It would not be long before the number of vehicles of all kinds grew in number along this road, sufficient to encourage and then force us to walk along the footpaths, but it would be another twenty years from the first photo before such a path was laid on the south side – there were no shops here.